“Brett Kavanaugh should not have been confirmed to the Supreme Court,” it opens.

“Almost one year ago, we heard the courageous and gut-wrenching testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, describing how Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in high school,” it continues.

“Her testimony was corroborated by multiple people she had previously told about the attack. And she wasn’t alone: Deborah Ramirez, a Yale classmate, also claimed to have been assaulted by Kavanaugh in college.”

The rancorous hearing, which saw Kavanaugh heatedly deny the charges and express his love of beer, ended in an 11–10 vote to send the confirmation to the full Senate. Collins was the swing vote.

The Senate voted 50–48 on party lines to confirm Kavanaugh’s nomination and he took his seat on the high court last October.

This week, however, new allegations and details of Kavanaugh’s sexual misconduct were reported by The New York Times in a controversial excerpt from an upcoming book about Kavanaugh by two Times reporters.

The book focuses on the culture at Yale University, which Kavanaugh attended for undergraduate studies. But the excerpt dwelled on the section dealing with allegations the judge sexually assaulted another student, Deborah Ramirez, at a drunken party.

According to The Times:

During the winter of her freshman year, a drunken dormitory party unsettled her deeply. She and some classmates had been drinking heavily when, she says, a freshman named Brett Kavanaugh pulled down his pants and thrust his penis at her, prompting her to swat it away and inadvertently touch it. Some of the onlookers, who had been passing around a fake penis earlier in the evening, laughed.

“I had gone through high school, I’m the good girl, and now, in one evening, it was all ripped away,” she said in an interview earlier this year at her Boulder, Colo., home.

The Ramirez incident was brought to the attention of the FBI during the confirmation hearing as part of a supplemental investigation. But the agency never followed up even though Ramirez provided the names of 25 corroborating witnesses.

The ‘investigation’ that Republicans conducted into the allegations against Kavanaugh was a farce,” the fundraising appeal proclaims.

It’s painful to look back at the Kavanaugh hearings, remembering how Dr. Blasey Ford’s compelling testimony was answered with a hyper-partisan diatribe by a man seeking a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court,” Schiff writes.

“But here’s one thing that’s worth remembering. He was confirmed by a single vote, and the Senator who put him over the top was Republican Senator Susan Collins.

It was a stark reminder that elections have consequences. But as 2020 approaches, we have a chance to replace Collins with a Senator who will truly stand up for women and our democracy: Sara Gideon.” it continues.

Gideon, 47, is currently Speaker of the Maine House of Representatives.

She worked her way up in local politics starting with a seet on the Freeport Town Council. She was elected to the Maine House in 2012, reelected in 2014 and became House Speaker in 2016.

She sponsored legislation to expand abortion access and extended state benefits to families in poverty. She also supported Medicare expansion in Maine, including the 2017 referendum on the issue, and helped override GOP Gov. Paul LePage’s veto of a bill to make the anti-overdose drug Narcan available over the counter.

She announced her Senate campaign in June and drew national attention. In the first week of her campaign she raised more than one million dollars and has been endorsed by Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

“We can hold Collins and the GOP accountable for pushing a dangerously flawed man like Kavanaugh onto the Supreme Court,” Schiff wrote.

To make matters worse, the book titled,”The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation,” claimed to have uncovered a previously unreported incident involving Kavanaugh in his freshman year.

“A classmate, Max Stier, saw Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student,” according to the newspaper.

The Times story, which ran on the opinion pages, was damning, but contained a key omission from the book. The woman, who’d been a student at the time of the incident, declined to be interviewed and friends said she did not recall the incident.

The Yale classmate, a prominent lawyer who reported the incident to the FBI, declined to comment publicly, according to The Times.

Conservative critics, including President Trump seized on the omission in an effort to undermine the story and by association the allegations. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other GOP lawmakers have echoed Trump’s criticisms.

Several Democratic presidential candidates on Sunday (Sept. 15) called for Kavanaugh’s impeachment based on The Times’ story.

Keith Girard has 30 years of experience as an award-winning reporter, editor-in-chief, and senior media executive. Keith’s career began in Washington, D.C., where he was a reporter for The Washington Post and a contributing editor for Regardie's and Washingtonian magazines. He also worked as a writer/producer in CNN's Washington Bureau and has written one book on the U.S. Marines in the Gulf War.